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Russia's Communist Party marked the 63rd anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin in Moscow on Thursday. Hundreds of people holding Stalin portraits and Soviet flags gathered near the memorial to Georgi Zhukov in the center of Moscow. Party members then moved to pay their respects at Stalin’s grave near the Kremlin wall, where they laid flowers and wreaths. Joseph Stalin held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from April 3, 1922 until the day of his death. He died on March 5, 1953 at his residence in Kuntsevo Dacha.

Americans from coast to coast plan to commemorate the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s 2016 election win by screaming into the void. Download Thousands of Facebook users have signed up to attend events on Boston Common in Boston and in Washington Square Park in New York on Nov. 8. Events are also planned in Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and in Bellingham, Washington.

Some 2,100 people said they will attend the New York protest and 15,000 more indicated an interest in going. More than 4,500 people were registered for the Boston event with 33,000 others showing an interest. 

A special religious service is being held in the German town of Wittenberg to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

The Reformation caused lasting change in Europe, leading to wars and persecution, but also to greater freedom of religion and expression.

Ahead of the anniversary, Mrs Merkel said the ceremonies provided "the opportunity to reflect on what changes resulted from the Reformation".

At the time, news of the breakthrough on December 2, 1942, was conveyed  only in code: “The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.”Our “Italian navigator” was Enrico Fermi, the physicist who had escaped fascist Italy for America. The “New World” was not a place but a time: the atomic age. On that day 75 years ago, Fermi’s team set off the first controlled and sustained nuclear chain reaction.

The rest of the story is well-known: Bombs were made. Bombs were dropped. Hundreds of thousands of people died. A war was won.

“It’s always been a complicated story,” says Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the journal founded by former Manhattan Project scientists concerned about atomic weapons. Over the past 75 years, as the specter of nuclear annihilation has grown and waned and grown again, newspapers reporting on the anniversary have tried to grapple with that legacy.

Candles to light up Hong Kong on fraught Tiananmen anniversary

Many people in Hong Kong plan to commemorate the bloody 1989 crackdown by Chinese troops in and around Tiananmen Square by lighting candles across the city on Thursday, circumventing a ban on the usual public gathering amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The anniversary strikes an especially sensitive nerve in the semi-autonomous city this year after Beijing’s move last month to impose national security legislation in Hong Kong, which critics fear will crush freedoms in the financial hub.

The war that arrived a decade ago is still too painful and too controversial to be taught to schoolchildren

They are desperate and want to see real change, so they’ve stopped looking at the news or remembering past events.”

But the Americans didn’t give us that chance. They did all the things possible to ensure that Iraq is going to be ruined.”

2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation

Millions of Iranians participated in government-backed rallies marking the 35th anniversary of the Islamic revolution on Tuesday, Iranian state media reported.

“We are eager for all options on the table,” many of the placards read, cheerfully held up by Iranian families pushing baby strollers while shouting, “Death to America.” Other posters said, “We are ready for the great battle.”

Testifying before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee a week ago, Ms. Sherman said that the Iranian government had started handing out free food, after the United States released $500 million to Iran as part of a temporary agreement over the country’s nuclear program.

Turkey commemorates 562nd anniversary of Istanbul's conquest by the Ottoman Empire in a massive ceremony in Istanbul's Yenikapı district public arena on Saturday afternoo

Two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain.“The divide is generally down political party lines,” says professor Peter Hicks, a British historian with the Napoléon Foundation in Paris. “On the left, there’s the ’black legend’ of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the ’golden legend’ of a strong leader who created durable institutions.”

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, a decade ago, the president and prime minister—at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin—boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest military victory. More from the May 16 Issue Political First Responders Flights of Fancy Flower Power “It’s almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story,” Hicks tells Newsweek

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle,

housands gathered for a moving memorial service in Paris on Sunday, as a city and a nation paused to remember the scores of lives lost in a spate of terror attacks last year

honor the 17 victims of the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office and a Jewish supermarket last January, as well as the 130 victims of the coordinated massacre in November.

has become an informal memorial and a rallying point for free speech and democratic values after the attacks

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden called for the USA to "come to terms" with the darkest moments of its history Tuesday during a trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma, 100 years after a white mob burned the city's "Black Wall Street" to the ground, killing hundreds of Black Americans and forcing thousands from their homes. 

He also announced Vice President Kamala Harris will lead an effort aimed at protecting voting rights, saying the right to vote "is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen" in the face of restrictive Republican-led voting measures in state legislatures.

After the speech, Rev. Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign led a group, including the survivors of the massacre, in singing the civil rights anthem "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." The songs lyrics read, in part: "ain't gonna let no racism turn me around."

President Biden traveled to Oklahoma on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre amid a renewed reckoning over a long-overlooked attack that left as many as 300 people dead in a community once known as Black Wall Street.

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, an armed white mob attacked the all-Black district of Greenwood. The racist mob destroyed the area, leaving 40 square blocks in ruins and nearly 10,000 people homeless. A century later, it remains one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.

"But just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. It erases nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried, no matter how hard people try."

When the sun rises over Omaha Beach, revealing vast stretches of wet sand extending toward distant cliffs, one starts to grasp the immensity of the task faced by Allied soldiers on June 6, 1944, landing on the Nazi-occupied Normandy shore.

Several ceremonies were being held Sunday to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the decisive assault that led to the liberation of France and western Europe from Nazi control, and honor those who fell.

On D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches code-named Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold, carried by 7,000 boats. This year on June 6, the beaches stood vast and nearly empty as the sun emerged, exactly 77 years since the dawn invasion.

The US and Iran charged each other with ratcheting up tensions in the Persian Gulf as concerns about potential conflict build days before Iran marks one year since the US assassinated its most powerful military figure and less than three weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

ran appealed to the UN Security Council on Thursday to stop the US from conducting what it called heightened "military adventurism" in the Gulf and the Oman Sea, including dispatching nuclear-capable bombers to the region, declaring that it did not want conflict but would defend itself if necessary.

Earlier this week, defense officials told CNN new intelligence showed Iran has been moving short range ballistic missiles into Iraq.

I can’t believe it’s already Jan. 6 again! Time flies when you’re failing, as a nation, to reckon with an insurrection.

Another difficulty with this anniversary is that the date being marked is a Harrowing, Sad Event That Did Happen nestled inside a Much Worse Event That Did Not Happen. It’s a commingling of terror and relief not seen since Guy Fawkes.

Unused as we are to commemorating bad things that did not fully come to fruition, we are settling for forgetting key aspects of what happened while insisting that this sort of thing could never happen here again, or, as we prefer to call it, “how American History has always been taught.”

Almost everything about the Anglo-French bloodbath at the place known as “Azincourt” is disputed, apart from the sensational outcome

ome say the French-English ratio was six to one. Recent scholarship puts the disparity at four to three. Most agree that Henry fielded perhaps 1,500 men-at-arms and about 6,000 archers.

Overall, the death toll was appalling. French sources suggest that they lost between 4,000 and 10,000 men. Almost as bad, from the French point of view, its governing elite, including dukes and bishops, was annihilated.

"I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps

Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.

The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.

Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.

Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story,

First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914.